


Life and Legend

by inlovewithnight



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-09
Updated: 2006-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:19:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Life and Legend

He has lived too long.

When Galahad’s body is returned, brought home in empty trappings of honor by the young knights who accompanied him on his mad quest, Lancelot knows that he has lived too long. Beyond his allotted time.

He’s had the sense of it for years, in truth. From the moment he awoke in his bed in the fortress and realized that he had survived the battle. Impossibly, unnaturally, he had survived. He had turned his face from death when he ought to have looked it in the eye, and since then he lingers on without substance in this world. A ghost trapped in flesh. He has felt the wrongness of it since that morning, suspected his feeling was true, but now he _knows_ , and the certainty is an ache in his heart, another pain among many.

There is a grand funeral for Galahad. Arthur orders a feast such as has never been seen, the greatest honors the land can give for one of the heroes of Baden Hill. Lancelot hears the plans and thinks of winters when the knights made meals of leather cut from their saddles. He remembers Dagonet finding a single piece of dried fruit, dropped in some Roman’s haste, and giving it to Galahad, the youngest and weakest and the most ill. He wonders if Galahad still remembered that gift by the time he died. He wonders how his fallen brother would have classed that bit of fruit against the greatest extravagance offered by a poor and infant kingdom.

Lancelot does not attend the feasting, or the funeral. When Arthur drives Galahad’s sword into the soil above his sleeping head, Lancelot is in the stables, mucking-fork in hand, trading soiled straw for clean and emptying his mind and heart of everything but the soft sounds of the horses. When all of Arthur’s new knights raise their voices in a shout of honor to the fallen—the knights of the round table, the knights of the new Britain, the knights who were children when a handful of madmen and the tribes of the Woads fought the Saxons at Baden Hill—Lancelot is miles from the fortress, on horseback, trusting his mount to guide him through the dead of night. It doesn’t rain, though there is a high wind and the night is cold. When he finally stops and makes a fire, the wind stirs the sparks and embers and dashes the smoke into his eyes.

He blinks against the smoke and watches the glowing embers, his mind still carefully blank. The only way to live the life he has been given, before and beyond the point at which he should have died, is to wall away the things that can’t be looked at, to ignore the pain. He’s done the same so many nights in the course of his years that the empty state comes more naturally than sleep. He breathes, his heart beats, his hands go about their tasks, and he thinks of nothing at all. Before, he would've used this time to sharpen his swords, to prepare for the next battle.

Sparks fly up and fade in the dark. There are no more battles for him, here in the time beyond his life. Arthur’s first knight, the man who saved the queen at Baden Hill, the greatest hero of the age-- so the people speak of Lancelot. The miserable, murderous people of this land name him a warrior great enough to call a legend, and each time he hears it he fights the urge to spit the words back in their faces.

 _A warrior who has not lifted a sword in…_ He looks out toward the fields that held the battle where he should have died. Six years, now. Or perhaps eight. The years don’t mean anything anymore, count down toward nothing, and so he finds it more difficult to track them, difficult enough that he doesn't bother. Or perhaps time is simply meaningless, now, to him. He who once knew to the day how much time remained of his service. Strange indeed, the ways of the world. Strange and bitter as spoiled wine.

He has not been a warrior for a long time. Not since he woke and found that he lived, and that he was broken, and that his body would never again obey him well enough to fight. It betrays him even now, lungs aching in the damp night air, scars protesting the cold ground. He wills it all away behind walls that grow thinner with the passing years, and watches the fire fade down to ashes.

There are no tears or lamentations. There never have been. Lancelot does not mourn his losses; he burns them, in his heart and his mind if not in fact.  
**  
When he returns to the fortress the next day, Guinevere is waiting for him.

“He’s furious,” she says, standing in the stable door.

“Your majesty,” he murmurs, tipping his head and watching for the flash of discomfort in her eyes. She accepts the titles of honor given to her and Arthur by the people because they are _her_ people, but she is ill-suited to carry them. He looks at her and still sees a wild creature of pure will-- a warrior, not a queen. He suspects she sees the same, when she catches a glimpse of her own face in a glass or still water, when she looks down at the lines of her own body, her own skin.

Perhaps it is an intrusion, for him to think that he sees her as she sees herself. It’s almost definitely a presumption. But he is among the last who even know to look for such a thing in her, for something other than Britain’s queen. (Not _less_ than, never less; it is a vast change that the Britons have pressed upon two fighters by making them monarchs, but a change is not by nature an elevation, whatever the people wish to think. Not in Lancelot’s eyes.) He does look, and he sees, and he bears the weight of being one of the last to do that, just as he is one of the last who can truthfully seek shadows of a past self in Arthur's eyes.

“He wanted you there,” she goes on, watching him strip the tack from his horse and wave aside the stable boy’s offer of assistance. He takes care of each thing himself, every breath burning in his chest, old pain escaping its cage. He’s pushed himself too far, and he knows that she sees it; she sees everything. But she doesn’t say a word or raise a hand in admonition, and for that, if nothing else, he could have loved her.

She speaks again. “He doesn’t understand why you ran away.”

“Do you?”

She exhales slowly, and he can see her asking her gods for patience. “You could drive a stone mad, Lancelot,” she says. “I spoke to him as best I could. Explained what I thought.”

“I’m sure you were entirely correct.” He runs a soft cloth over the horse’s hide, smoothing sweat and dust away. “You know me exceedingly well, my lady.”

Her eyes flash again, now with warning, and he smiles despite himself. It’s such an ancient game. A joke so stale, its humor cannot be lost. _Oh, what great and mighty heroes are we all. Saviors of Britain._

“You should talk to him yourself,” she says, reaching out to touch the horse’s nose, addressing the beast instead of Lancelot directly. “Out of respect, at least, if you cannot muster any affection.”

“Is my respect for my commander in question?” He controls his voice, keeps it low enough not to startle the horses, but the tone is sharp as the swords he will not touch.

She shakes her head minutely, eyes still fixed on the path of her fingertips over the bridge of the horse’s nose.

“My affection, then.” He bites the words off, turning away to toss the cloth away. “You doubt that I love my commander. My liege lord. His majesty the king.”

“Lancelot.” Her voice is just as low, and bitterly cold. She meets his sharpness with winter’s frost, dulling the edges and slowing the will. “Please.”

She dragged him back to life from the lip of the grave. She made him fight her every step of the way, until he found himself alive and moving and thinking again, brought through the veil of despair and pain without even realizing he’d made the journey. He should hate her for that, curse her on each breath for taking his despair and forging it to anger. Instead, he finds he can refuse her nothing, and has not since he first opened his eyes and realized that he yet lived. She was the most worthy opponent he ever faced, and she won his surrender and the service of his hands.

Though not the guarantee of his good graces. “If you must have it, very well. I will. I’ll go to him immediately, if it _pleases_ you, my lady.”

“No. Later.” She still appears to speak to the horse, her fingers resting lightly on the broad bone of its forehead, her eyes solemnly meeting the warm brown depths of the beast’s. “You’ve tired yourself. You should rest now.”

It’s a simple statement. Innocent. Empty. And yet his heart beast faster in his aching chest and his breathing falters again. The great hero of the age is an idiot boy at heart, or perhaps a wounded animal, made so by the words of a woman who does not even look at him when she speaks them.

“Yes,” he says finally. “Perhaps I should rest. The wounds ache.”

“As they should, you idiot.” Now that she has won again, her words are sharp, knocking aside his frost-dulled and useless blades. The wounded feeling recedes as she drops her hand and turns from the horse to face him. “Sleeping on the ground in the woods instead of a bed. You’re not what you were, Lancelot.”

He has to laugh at that, and he doesn’t bother to hold that in bounds, the sound that escapes so raw that it startles the horses. “Yes, Guinevere. That, of all the things in the world, I know very well indeed.”  
**  
They undress on opposite sides of the bedchamber. It’s a strange sort of compromise, a freakish vestige of propriety-- he may _lie with_ the queen, in the evasive noble phrasing; he may _fuck_ the queen, in his own soldier’s argot, but he will not undress her, will not feel her skin exposed beneath his hands as he strips her garments away. That is an honor reserved for her husband, Arthur’s alone, a token privilege left to him.

Lancelot thinks of Arthur as he removes the leather armor he still wears, the layered jacket that holds him upright as much as skin and bone. Then his trousers and his shirt in turn, hands working at ties from memory, thoughts still dwelling on the man who has ruled his fate since he was a child. The King of Britain, the great protector, the wielder of Excalibur. Arthur is a good king. Serious, honorable, devoted to these people whom he chose of his own free will. A good king. None can dispute that; none wish to, which is fortunate, as none would be permitted to so long as the knights ride out through the kingdom.

Arthur is a good king, but he is a different man now than the one who took arms at Baden Hill. It is inevitable, of course: power bends any flesh to its whims and needs. The people, and the legends they have begun to spin and tell, the legends that Lancelot thinks perhaps have replaced the living essences of each of them, all unawares, would have it that Arthur has become greater than he was. A _better_ man. Lancelot only knows that he is different. There is a hole in Arthur, a space that Rome and his innocent beliefs filled. Britain is not a perfect fit for that space; it leaves gaps here and there around the edges. And so scar tissue grows, and Arthur changes.

Lancelot’s fingers brush the marks on his own flesh, the lesser and greater reminders of sword and dagger and arrow, and the massive ugly knot in his chest left by the crossbow bolt meant to kill him. _All things change._

Guinevere's skin is smooth and pale, her hair falling to her shoulders in dark waves. He remembers her skin crossed and swirled with blue paint, her hair twisted up and back, exposing the lines of her jaw and her throat as she walked through the world like a battlefield. She still carries herself that way, but now the field is created by their bored and idle minds as they live these new lives of words and walls.

She crosses the room to him now, in that same warrior's stride, and he waits for her. Whether he is prize of war or ally or enemy, he will keep his pride.

At least what's left of it.

She touches him gently, her fingers brushing his cheek lightly as a ghost's before one of her hands settles on his shoulder, her thumb tracing the curve of his collarbone. Her other hand slides down his chest, following the flat line of his sternum and then moving off, drawn to the twisted scar like a signal fire.

She covers it with her palm, fingers splayed up and over his heart. He looks into her eyes, searching them as he does every time they meet this way, looking down through her lies and layers and secrets. Someday he will find pity there, the same pity that Arthur swears he does not feel, and then something in Lancelot, the last shred of the knight who was, will fade away into ashes.

She guides him as easily as he would one of the war-horses, and he hates that, hates how he responds to her touch like one of those creatures trained to bit and heel. He finds himself sitting on the bed with her kneeling over his lap, her thighs tight against the line of his hips. That reminds him too much of riding a horse as well, and he tenses. He settles his hands about her waist, intending to turn her on her back on the bed and assert an illusion of mastery here, but she claims his mouth with her own. The kiss is hot and wet and tastes of watered wine, and his tenuous plan is lost, swept away by the mingling of raw desire between them.

Her hand moves down his body, touching him with sure familiarity, putting him through his paces in this as well. It didn't always feel like this; he remembers coming together with her in challenge and in anger and in blind mindless passion. And once-- just once-- in hushed, tentative gentleness, seeking to give and take comfort together. That was a long time ago.

She moves against him with practiced ease, drawing a low moan from his lips and swallowing it down, prompting him to respond by touching her body without need for thought. He doesn't know when it became like this, a dance done by rote, a soulless drill like the Roman centurions used to do under the afternoon sun. Perhaps it has never been like this, perhaps it is only his troubled mind today making it so.

He breathes and moans and whispers her name as she guides him into her, as she slides down around him hot and wet and well-known. He cannot remember. He cannot think. He can only feel, and the feelings are muffled by layers of wool and chaff, held away from him by the pounding of his heart and the knowledge that Galahad has died, and for the first time in this last passage of years, one of his brothers is gone.

Time moves forward for everyone else, everyone but him, and he is forced to carry on in limbo. He lives, and he is the same, feeling all that he has felt before and will feel again, while the world warps and twists around him, changing against his will. Changing _him_ where it brushes up against him now and again--the scar on his chest, Guinevere's touch, the swords going dull and rusty in disuse--without consent or care.

Her breath comes faster, and her movements over him. Her head is tipped back, her lips parted, and he looks up at her and is caught anew by her beauty. She _is_ beautiful, Britain's queen, though to him the source of it is the steel in her, not the softness assigned by the words of the people as they rebuild her into myth.

She is changed the most in the new stories, he thinks. The knights with Arthur at their head are simply amplified, made greater than they ever were or could have been. Guinevere is stripped down to the bones and recreated as a new thing, without any of the pieces of herself that Lancelot thinks she would claim first if given the choice. Certainly they are the ones he would name first if asked of her. The new fools say that it was with mercy she saved him, with a gentle heart, and there is no possible response to even the thought of that but laughter, the sound choking out on heavy breaths as she grinds down against him. She stills for an instant, her hands tightening on his shoulders, and a flash of frustration crosses her face. Neither of them speaks, the strange moment fades-- _are they not all strange moments, here?_ \-- and they resume their coupling with an edge of anger in the air that does not dissipate when she shudders and tightens around him and he spends himself inside her.

She lowers her head, eyes closed and lips parted, and slowly sinks down to settle against his chest. For a moment the only sound is their ragged breathing, and he reaches up to brush a damp strand of hair off her sweaty face.

She pulls away, shaking her head. "You're not even here," she says, jaw tight, as her feet find the floor and she moves back to where she left her clothing pooled on the floor. "Is it really so terrible here, Lancelot, that you must take yourself away? That nothing at all can hold you?"

"I don't know what you mean, Guinevere. If I were ever to go a day's ride from the walls, Arthur would come find me and bring me back. Well, perhaps not Arthur personally. The knights." Free men of Britain, now, Arthur's knights, and they do his bidding more eagerly for that then Roman threats ever forced the Sarmatians to do.

"Oh, yes, how dare we?" She snatches up her dress and turns away. "How dare we not let you go running off to kill yourself. How dare we care for you. How dare _anyone_ love you, against your will?"

"Love? Is this love?" There is too much in that question, so he rushes past it, stumbling on to other words. "Is it love to keep me here without a purpose, rotting away so that you and Arthur might be spared from feeling guilt?"

"You have a purpose, if you would take it." Her voice is clipped and choked, forced out around emotion held in check. "Arthur would have you at his right hand. The knights would be honored to have your training. You are my champion--"

"In name only." He shakes his head, watching her, not bothering to reach for the bedding or his clothing. Let her see his scars, if she looks at him at all. "All in name only, Guinevere. And a purpose that is only words is no purpose at all."

"You refuse to try. You refuse to fight."

"I never refuse to fight." He shouts the words, though he shouldn't; his chest burns in reaction, and he chokes on the next words and has to try again. "I never refuse a battle that is _mine_ to fight."

"You made Rome's battles yours."

His hand comes up to touch the scar again, and he stares at her, knowing that she cannot possibly be aware of what she's saying and yet unable to forgive her for it. "And so you would have me serve you as I served Rome?" Her eyes sweep the bed, her own half-assembled clothing, the exposed flesh of his body, and he sees the meaning sink home. "Am I your slave, then, Guinevere?"

"You know better." Tears thicken her voice now, and shine in her eyes, and he's startled to find that he doesn't care. Her tears could always burn through him, before. "Why are you doing this? Galahad is dead, and so you cannot even try to live anymore?"

He reaches for his clothing now; he needs to go, needs air, needs silence. "Forgive me if I resent my brother his peace."

"As if my forgiveness would mean anything to you."

"I've never been able to believe that the dead care at all for the forgiveness of the living."

Her hand slams down against the back of a chair, sending it clattering across the floor. "You _are not dead_."

"Only because you denied it to me." He holds his armor against his chest, pressing it against the burning pain, and goes to see the king.  
**  
The chamber that holds the Round Table is cool and dark, and although Lancelot will never say so to Arthur, it has always felt the closest to a holy place of any that Lancelot can name. Arthur is there, lost in thought in the shadows. In the Roman times, he did his thinking in his chambers, at his own desk, with a light, but he is the king now, and remaining here at the seat of his power seems to give him the strength to be so.

There are more chairs around the table now than Lancelot remembers, and every one of them is filled when the knights gather in the fortress. Lancelot does not know them. From his hours in the stables, he knows which are good to their horses and which are careless or cruel, but he does not know the names that go with their faces, and never seeks to learn. The fools will pay the price in battle, and the horses will be born again, perhaps somewhere far away and open, where they can run. Where they can be free.

"Lancelot."

Arthur is tired; it is clear from his voice and his face, carved deep with lines of weariness visible even in the shadows. His kingdom is even heavier on his shoulders than the Roman armor he used to wear, and Guinevere bears less of the weight now than she used to. The world changes, and the people have come to prize their half-Roman soldier-king above the woman born among them, the woman unable to bear a child to carry on Arthur's line.

She grieved that fact, once; he remembers, he held her through the storms of anger and mourning. Time has pressed them out of her and left cool, vague regret that would not require his comfort even if he still had any to offer. He wonders if Arthur ever did or does. He wonders what passes between the two of them, what they share, beyond the desire to keep Lancelot alive and within the walls.

"Where did you go?" Arthur's hands are clasped before him on the table; Lancelot supposes he must have been praying. "Gawain and Bors were disappointed that you weren't there."

Once Arthur would have considered such a conversational feint to be below him. "I rode out into the forest."

"Why?"

That _is_ the Arthur of old, and Lancelot laughs, shaking his head. Perhaps not _all_ has changed. "Is there any answer I can give to that question that will satisfy you?"

"The truth."

"I don't know." He looks away, searching the walls of the room, where the swords of the honored dead hang in silence. His own blades should be there. He wonders if when the day does come, Arthur will give an absurd, symbolic order-- to place them next to Excalibur, perhaps. It seems likely. This new age, this time of tales and legends and other pretty words for lies, suits Arthur best of all. He always believed in myths and dreams.

"Do you hate me so much now, Lancelot?" Arthur's voice is neutral, without pain, and his eyes are clear of any track or sign that Lancelot can read. They knew each other, once.

"I don't hate you, Arthur. I never have."

"You think me selfish, though." He slides his hands across the smooth surface of the table, that steady green gaze tracking down to watch the faint streaks the touch leaves. "I nearly lost you once, and cannot bear the thought of it again, and so I selfishly keep you here with me and alive. Yes?"

"You promised me freedom." The word is ashes in his mouth, now. He remembers when it was meat and water, when it was life, when it was everything. "I _earned_ my freedom."

"You are free of Rome. You've been free of Rome for years."

Such stupidity can only be deliberate, and he recognizes the stubborn set of Arthur's jaw well enough to know this is. It doesn't help the anger banking low and hot in his gut. "Rome kept her promise. I'm talking about _you_. You promised me as well, Arthur. And yet you keep me caged."

"You would not survive the journey to the mainland, much less to Sarmatia. You know that." Arthur shakes his head, his eyes still on the table. "Freedom to die is no freedom at all, Lancelot."

"On the contrary, Arthur. It is the only true freedom there is."

"You truly wish to leave us." Lancelot doesn't know who that means-- Arthur and Guinevere, Bors and Gawain, the horses in the stables, the graves in the cemetery under their sad little swords, all of Britain. He wants to answer that if he left them, they would all still have each other.

Perhaps that is what Arthur fears.

"I wish to have my freedom," he says instead. "I wish to be free to choose."

Arthur shakes his head, finality in the motion, the stone-solid denial of a king. "I love you too much to lose you, my friend."

They made chains of love, every one. Guinevere bound Arthur here with her love of the land. Arthur bound himself here for love of duty and his God. And they both claimed love as what they felt for him, why they hold him, why they will not or cannot let him go.

"Your God is a god of mercy," Lancelot says, one final desperate lunge into the dark.

"When it suits Him." Arthur looks up at him now, and Lancelot can no longer find the pity in his eyes, only resolve. "But His will is of stone."  
**  
Lancelot moves through the corridors of the fortress, and the servants yield before him, letting him make his way untouched. He follows a random path, from the walls to the towers to the storage cellars and then to the stables, where the horses huff softly in recognition and then leave him alone. He finds a corner and leans his forehead against the wall, eyes tightly closed, lungs burning with pain again and body shaking with the effort of holding himself silent and still.

The future unfolds in his mind, days and seasons and years stretching out too far to grasp. These walls will hold him until the end of the world. He will fade to a ghost and still drift from one corner to another, from battlefield to bedchamber to tower to stables, never to know peace or to find home again.

He tugs his shirt free and fumbles his hand under it, seeking the hard knot of the scar and pressing against it, letting the pain flare up and settle into a white-hot glow behind his eyes. A ragged gasp escapes his lips before he can bite it back, and a low sound that from another man might have been called a sob.

But Lancelot does not mourn, does not grieve, does not cry. He sets fire to his losses. He burns.

His lungs burn in his chest. A hundred funeral pyres burn behind his eyes in memory. And time-- time-- the Sun God's endless march in fire across the sky--

That fire burns him alive with every breath, every heartbeat, every sunrise and sunset he sees in this shadowy world before death and past life, where he will dwell forever, a fragment of a legend, a man out of time.  



End file.
